“A multitude of leading newsrooms have recently injected code into their websites that blocks OpenAI’s web crawler, GPTBot, from scanning their platforms for content.”

“Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that’s been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe.”

“Sisi Wei, editor in chief at The Markup, said their newsroom policy is journalists are not allowed to input paragraphs into ChatGPT, out of worry that the information gets fed into the large language model without their control over where it goes and how it’s used.”

“Last year, the Post declined offers to sell Arc XP, the company’s in house publishing tool and software business, saying it would instead invest $50 million in the business in 2023. But on August 22, the paper told several top marketing staffers, program managers, and product designers at Arc XP that the Post would be eliminating their roles in the coming weeks.”

“The story of Skyblog — a blogging platform that was hugely popular among Francophone teenagers in the early to mid-2000s, and became arguably one of the first major social networks — is that of an early European tech success that was, eventually, driven into obsolescence by powerhouse American rivals.”

“Since April, after X introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges, the platform has seen hundreds of newly verified Chinese sextortion accounts, according to Robin Li, founder of online safety software PureTwitter. They prey on Chinese users, harassing the community’s most prominent voices — often political dissidents and influential opinion leaders. The scammer accounts have alienated many users who had turned to the platform as a crucial news source outside of the Great Firewall.”

“Platforms are both fragmented today than they were in 2016, more resistant to spam attacks, and more skeptical of the news. You soon may be able to generate unfathomable amounts of targeted political material, but you still have to deliver it to your target. And that’s getting harder all the time.”

“At first, we had hoped to only use text-to-video (a prompt that describes what you want to generate video of). The plan was to create all our AI footage from text prompts, but due to time constraints we opted to use some stock footage and filmed some sequences to help guide the AI to where we wanted it.”

“We also had a rule: No traditional quotes, dialogue only.”

“The deal is part of a broader effort by Yahoo under its new ownership and leadership structure to invest in a few key pillars, often through acquisitions, including news, sports, finance, mail and search.”

“On Tuesday, Google announced a new tool — called SynthID — that it says could be part of the solution. The tool embeds a digital ‘watermark’ directly into the image that can’t be seen by the human eye but can be picked up by a computer that’s been trained to read it. Google said its new watermarking tech is resistant to tampering, making it a key step toward policing the spread of fake images and slowing the dissemination of disinformation.”

“This is not Kloss’s first dip into media: She previously led a consortium of investors—including movie producer Jason Blum, Kaia Gerber, the fashionable race car driver Lewis Hamilton, and Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green—who partnered with Bustle Digital Group to buy W magazine in 2020 from Marc Lotenberg, whose Twitter (er, X) profile reads, ‘Business, with a side of controversy.’”

“A group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, though readers won’t find a machine’s byline anytime soon. On August 1st, an AI chatbot tool was added to Macworld, PCWorld, Tech Advisor, and TechHive, promising that readers can ‘get [their] tech questions answered by AI, based only on stories and reviews by our experts.'”